''Vladimir Nabokov's Comic Quest for Reality' - Nottingham eTheses

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his own memory of the Past, made into a piece of art,
serves to illustrate his theories: Van defines time
as rhythm:
... not the recurrent beats of the rhythm
but the gap between two such beats, the
gray gap between black beats: the Tender
Interval. The regular throb itself merely
brings back the miserable idea of measurement,
but in between,. something like true
Time lurks (538).
To attain "the feel of the texture of Time" (548), it
is necessary that the rhythm should be regular, but
also that one should not simply select some random
events, but that these events (these "beats") "should
be not only gaudy and graduated, but related to each
other by their main feature... " (549).
As already hinted above, Van also holds special
views of the past:
The past, then, is a constant accumulation
of images. It can be easily contemplated
and listened to, tested and tasted at random,
so that it ceases to mean the orderly
alternation of linked events that it does
in the large theoretical sense. It is now
a generous chaos out of which the genius of
total recall,..., can pick anything he
pleases... (545).
Of this he gives an example. Looking back from his
vantage point in 1922 into the Past, he haphazardly
picks what he pleases, jumping about in time, from
1888 to 1901, back to 1883, then forward again to
1884, and eventually to an incident of only a day
ago. But, as he admits, the images he selects "tell
us nothing about the texture of time into which they
are woven... " (5 46); they have nothing in common, they
are unconnected, and only serve to prove the complete
freedom the mind has when contemplating the Past.
This is not, however, how he deals with his and